Fif’s team hasn’t had this much spotlight since they were hocking video games and t-shirts at Footlocker. And from the sounds of it, that isn’t going to change any time soon. We’ve known about a new G-Unit album for a while now, but because Curtis is out here striving for greatness, we can expect a mixtape to proceed the album.

50 sat down with MTV to discuss his group.

On a G-Unit mixtape:

You’ll see a mixtape come out before [the album]. The material that you see me putting out is just me, you know, getting back to the very beginning… there’ll be a full tape coming out before [the album].

On the new G-Unit album’s sound:

We’re still trying to find that song that combines the record, and then we’ll build off that record. Just going into the studio, the chemistry, the formula we used to make the albums in the past, I’d come up with one joint, one song and it kinda helped, like, this is what the record should be like. And then we sequence the rest of the records following that record.

On how the group operates creatively:

Well, we got some interesting stuff already made, but it doesn’t take long. Having that many moving parts, creatively everybody kind of keeps up with each other at points, so nobody will be left behind. They’ll give you something that they have, even if they don’t come up with it on the spot. Like, they’ve written a lot of stuff away from me, so I don’t know what portion that they have is material they just came up with, or if its something they had an idea that they’ve been working with for a while. But it’s really up to standard, so I could care less.

At least in interview form, 50 seems open to creative input from other members of his team. Not that being a control freak was ever a major knock against him.

And how are we feeling about this build-an-album-around-a-single concept? G-Unit never really tried to be thinking man rap, so I won’t sit here and act like I’m expecting anything close to a concept album. As fun as it is to talk about G-Unit in 2014, any album that delivers more than five songs worth repeating will be a success in my book.